A Change Is Gonna Come To Ferguson

I believed that Ferguson was all but forgotten. After all, Darren Wilson, the police offer who executed Michael Brown has still not been arrested. I figured he wouldn’t be. I thought that the rise in rage, drive, and hunger for justice in Ferguson, Missouri had reached its crescendo.

This weekend renewed my hope for justice, when a coalition of local groups – clergy, labor unions, educators and youth – came together in Ferguson to protest police brutality.

It was dubbed “Ferguson October” and “Weekend of Resistance.” They, along with the rest of the country, still want answers about the events that left Michael Brown, an unarmed 18 year-old teenager, dead.

While there are some who wish to invoke images of the past and compare Ferguson to the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955, there is no comparison.

What happened in Montgomery was magic.What happened in Montgomery altered the course of a nation. It was a 13-month mass protest that ended with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregation on public buses is unconstitutional.

As the years have gone by and the rights of African-Americans continue to be stripped away – assaults on voting rights, affirmative action, education and Stop and Frisk policies quickly come to mind –we’ve come to realize that its not 1960 anymore when peaceful protest actually created changes in national policy.